How common is it that a mans' personality flips and changes after you have their baby? (baby trapping)

[AnnaBelIa]

I hear many stories about men flipping after the baby is born, becoming different people, starting affairs etc. I am wondering how common it is, seeing as statistics will only reflect divorces and breakups, not the women who choose to stick around.

Curious to hear stories.

It hasn’t happened to me but I have seen it happen to one couple very close to me. I think he really wanted kids but in reality didn’t understand what the responsibility of that would mean. He’s now pushing 50 living back at home with his mum and unlikely to leave again and sees his kids for a few hours for lunch every Saturday- and he’s absolutely over the moon with this arrangement. It’s pretty unbelievable to watch to be honest but I don’t think it’s as rare as I’d like to believe.

@ohfookyup I was married to a man like this. 3 kids in he suddenly announced that actually family life was him and moved 100 miles away back to his mothers! Goes months without seeing the kids. This was a man I was with nearly 20 years by the way up until having children and especially twins there were little to no red flags!

Yes was with him 11 years before we had a baby. Went to a shop and bought a dummy as couldn’t stand the crying apparently then I proceeded to live life as a single person as he never really went anywhere with us - shopping, fetes, weddings, parties etc so I thought I may aswell be on my own daughter 21 now and doesn’t bother with him as he’s never really bothered with her

I can think of one man like this out of all the couples I know. So I'm sure it happens but I don't think it's common.

I mean if they are abusive then, pretty common. And unfortunately lots of people are abusive.

Lets be real, 60-75 percent chance that if you have a kid with a guy - he won’t be good at the actual parenting side of things. That you’ll wind up doing the majority of the share of everything in the home including looking after the kids. And I’ll go with a 30-40 percent chance he will also be abusive in some way shape or form. Not to say that there were no signs of that abuse before the baby of course.

Personally I’d never have a kid with a man either way becuase IF you’ve got something good, why risk it by completely changing the dynamics?

And if it isn’t good, or it turns out they aren’t great at parenting or, are abusive then why on earth would you want to risk being tied to them forever through a kid?

Far too risky. Completely unnecessary.
I guess you could argue that if we all thought that way, no one would have kids. But you, know, we probably shouldn’t. As women there’s very few things that are more dangerous than having children. Besides having them with people who are technically, our greatest natural predator.

My exh was like this. When we had our second and last child it was like a switch was flipped. He went from being the proud father with our first child to deciding this parenting malarkey was far too much hard work when the second one arrived. It went downhill from there

I can't thing of any that I know. I've heard of one (an old friend's new partner. I've never met the partner), I've mostly lost touch with her, but it did seem the relationship changed a lot after the baby came.

A good indicator though - if they want children before marriage.

No decent man would ask that of you.

(Unless they know you are very anti marriage)

Men know it’s exceedingly disrespectful to ask that of a woman. A decent man commits to you first before bringing children into the equation.

So you already know they are, at best, a bum who doesn’t care about you, likes the “idea“ of the child but probably won’t do much to actually raise it (I mean why would they? They are even willing to commit to you, a person who already exists).

Or at worst, someone who intends to baby trap you, because in their eyes a marriage might trap you both but a baby, will only trap you.

Very common. It's not just the baby trapping element. It's that you used to put him first. Now you put your child first. And alot of them can't handle that. Mine kicked off because I'd ran out baby a bath but hadn't ran him a bath. He ended up nearly killing both of us. But because he didn't in the end cafcas thinks it's fine.

My husband struggled with the tiredness, relentlessness and balancing act of parenting, for a child he’d always wanted and said he was thrilled about. That’s fine, the tiredness is brutal. But the refusal to get up in a morning, the rudeness and nastiness towards me (not our child, thankfully), laziness, proclivity to sit on the sofa and do fuck all whilst I was doing dinner and chores and bedtime and then post-bedtime chores started to really fuck me off, and he explained at length that he was really tired after work and just wanted to chill out for a bit, and was surprised when I didn’t think that was a fair way of doing stuff. Eventually, I left.

We were together a while before having a child and he was quite lazy and liked a long sleep at a weekend, but he got a lot worse quickly.